Auscultation

Auscultation

III

100% Silk

A term for listening to sounds within the body as a method of diagnosis is a poignantly perfect moniker for Portland producer Joel Shanahan’s most elusive and emotive electronic aura-reading solo alias: Auscultation. III arrives a full four years after its SILK predecessor, L’étreinte Imaginaire, delayed by tragedies too expansive to enumerate. Throughout, these shadowy psychic rhythms percolated at the periphery, as both escape and exorcism. The songs share a smeared mood of longing and lament, foggy melodies gliding through low-lit spaces, dissipated dance floor ether spiraling like smoke under a streetlight. It’s a music of faces in the night and things unsaid, swaying at the threshold. What could have been and what will always be. Mastered by Eric Hanson. Design by Britt Brown.

Auscultation

L'étreinte Imaginaire

100% Silk

Auscultation is Madisonian-gone-Oregonian musician Joel Shanahan’s outlet for slinkier, more subliminal productions, as inaugurated on last year’s sprawling self-titled debut for 1080p Collection. His sophomore set, L’étreinte Imaginaire (which translates generally as imaginary embrace), was recorded off and on across France and Wisconsin throughout the last year, during and between various regional tours. The album’s seven selections swerve through jazzy, sunflared house (“Black Window,” “Composure Fuzz”), glimmering rhythm (“Stranded Love”), and misted, moody electronics (“Drop Off,” “Lost You In The Fog”). As with Shanahan’s work via Golden Donna and elsewhere, structures spiral and slide, textures phase in and out of focus, and a mood of heavy longing hovers in the headphones. Even so, the sense of focus and craft-sharpening here is unambiguous; these pieces are among his most plasmatic, pensive, and aerodynamic. Slow growth on a shadowed vine. The embrace may be imaginary but the touch feels real. Mastered by Alter Echo.